Summary
The speaker of "Tin Tan Tan" is a young man, a poet (he will appear as a central character in "Bien Pretty") who is addressing his lost love in very flowery, melodramatic language. His poem, written in short paragraphs in the form of an acrostic (each paragraph begins with a letter of the woman's name), makes it quite clear that he is heartbroken and will probably die if she isn't moved to take him back.
The other side of this love affair is described in "Bien Pretty," whose narrator, Lupe, is the woman addressed in the preceding poem. Lupe, a painter, moved from San Francisco to San Antonio and is house-sitting for a fashionable artist; she hired an exterminator to get rid of the cockroaches and then hired him to pose for her, and they fell in love. In the midst of a passionate affair, he told her he had to return to Mexico to take care of something involving his children, and she eventually heard that he has two wives in two different Mexican cities. Now she really misses him but is trying to convince herself that she doesn't need him in order to be happy.
Analysis
"Tin Tan Tan" is a sort of overture to the book's final story, and together these two stories illustrate one of Cisneros' recurring themes, the two different worlds inhabited by a woman and a man — specifically, by a Chicana and the Mexican man with whom she can't help falling in love but with whom she cannot live and still retain her independent identity and self-respect.
Flavio's poem is utterly based on form, and what he says in it is so prescribed by tradition as to be clichéd; it purports to be a baring of his soul, but the reader recognizes that the poet either doesn't mean a word of it, really, or is actually suffering but cannot break out of his self-constructed "romantic" persona long enough to convey any real (as opposed to phony) emotion.
Lupe, his beloved, has come to San Antonio to help her recover from another, longer-term romance with a man who threw her over for a blonde. She is very much into traditional Latino culture and cannot help falling for Flavio's looks and masterful masculinity, but she is irritated when he points out that he really is Mexican and thus doesn't need to rely on various trappings, costumes, and so on. He would also like her to behave like a traditional Latino woman — that is, to be submissive, demure, ladylike — and she can't and/or won't comply. When he leaves, she is partly devastated, partly relieved.
Like "Never Marry a Mexican" and "Eyes of Zapata," "Bien Pretty" is told in a non-linear fashion by its narrator. Although the events of the main "story" (the love affair) are related more or less in chronological order, Lupe tells other things about herself and engages in related musings between and among these events; the effect of this narrative style is to suggest an unplanned, relatively shapeless, stream-of-consciousness exposition of both character and incident. Also as in those other two stories, the image of the woman's gaze (especially the artist's gaze) "possessing" the man — remaking him as her creature — appears here. Lupe, however, is less obsessed and much less bitter than Clemencia in "Never Marry a Mexican"; she seems, as the narrative ends, to be moving on with her life as an independent woman.
Glossary
"Me abandonaste, . . . el amor de Dios" "You abandoned me, woman, because I'm very poor, / And for having the disgrace of being married. / What am I to do if I am the Abandoned One, / Abandoned I shall be, for the love of God." (From "El Abandonado" [by Jesus Martínez].)
"Ya me voy ,/ ay te dejo en San Antonio" "Now I'm leaving, / O I leave you in San Antonio."
chaparritos short people.
corajes angers.
"La Cucuracha Apachurrada" "The Squashed Cockroach."
curandero medicine man; folk healer.
retablo alterpiece.
rebozos shawls.
Adiós y suerte Goodbye and good luck.
De poeta y loco todos tenemos un poco We all have a little of a poet and a crazy person in us.
Cuidate Take care.
Abrazos Hugs.
el baile de los viejitos the dance of the elders.
Regresa a Mi Return to Me; this is the name (and advertised effect) of a "magic" powder which Lupe has bought, she says, for the colorful design of its label.
lárgate get out.
Amar es Vivir To Love is to Live.
"Soy infeliz" I'm unhappy.
"Ya no. Es verdad que te adoro, pero más me adoro yo" "Not anymore. It's true I adore you, but I adore myself more."
tan tán the famous end to Mexican movies.
